Defiance of the Fall by TheFirstDefier

“Royal Road” as the publisher is the red flag among red flags.

Waiting for more chapters hope they will be soon be ready to be read again ☺️

Pain. That's what I feel when I think of this novel. Just pain.

This used to be one of my favourite novels of all time, I would look forward to my next moment of free time to come back and binge read the shit out of it, watching how the mc grows in power by getting titles and stats, has awesome fights with cool enemies, builds relationships with other characters and even establishes his own "kingdom".

However, that is no longer the case.

The author has taken away every single character the mc was even remotely close with, be it through death or by sending them to the opposite end of the f#cking universe. He also decided to basically make stats and titles completely irrelevant and make power levels be determined almost exclusively by "Dao comprehension". This makes it extremely hard to judge how powerful anyone is and also makes his advantage in stats feel hollow, removing the joy of seeing those numbers go up.

The author also basically removed any personality and agency from the mc by having him basically be a puppet for some million year old monsters as well as THE FUCKING SYSTEM ITSELF to bring together the shards and create glimpses of chaos. Mcs personality at this point is just "I have to get stronger or the shards will harm me, and to do that I need to get more shards, which will make them harm me. It's fine, I'll just repeatedly put myself through literal torture with absolutely no repercussions". This is exactly what mc does, every single advancement coming with a whole chapter describing how excruciatingly painful it was and how the mc repeatedly wanted to kill himself from the pain. After dozens of advancements like this, it's impossible for someone to not have some sort of trauma, but the mc is perfectly fine. In fact, he looks forward to the next time he can torture himself.

This has turned into a weird torture porn story where the one being tortured is the mc, either physically or emotionally. He is unable to form any meaningful relationships because the author immediately takes them away when he does. He is constantly in danger, on the brink of death, or heading towards danger. Every waking moment the mc is struggling in one form or another, which I guess is expected from the title but really isn't what I came for. All of this is exacerbated by how f#cking SLOW it's become. There's no visible payoff to all this pain and struggle. 800 chapters in and the mc is still in E-grade, and there are entire chapters of the mc simply monologuing over the dao, which would be interesting if it wasn't so tedious.

This story just isn't fun anymore, reading every new chapter is simply a chore, which makes me very sad since the earlier chapters before he leaves Earth were an absolute blast.

This novel really need prof read some parts of the novel is not mention, and the concept is jumbled and not well stated.... Will though it's good for pastime if you are waiting for other novel updates...

The fight scenes are really bad, writing could be a lot better and Zac is just a really annoying person.

With these type of novels I just want to see fast powerups and interesting abilities, I don’t really care about characterization.

DROPPED the novel,

Not interested in reading a lonely bastard who has no obvious purpose in his pursuit of power—all he mentioned was survive to see his parents.

This novel might've gathered a lot of sales on Amazon, but it's still dogshit. So now I know not every selling novels are good, most are just made of networking and collaborating with other authors and advertisement—this novel being one.


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It's simply not worth my time. Rn, I'm not lacking good Kindle fantasy novels to read. If it's not top quality? NEXT... Rating? 3/5 ... get urself an editor. This is like reading a second draft.

"But it's a publish book."

Then it's simply dogsh*t. But if u like Everyone Else is a Returnee... this novel is for you.

I'm going to be honest; I love this story. The world building is interesting, it's a system novel that doesn't just say, "because the system says it works that way" all the time, it has multiple dynamic growth systems (Dao, levels, soul, Dao-technique integration, bloodline, heart cultivation (resolve), etc.) I guess the progression could be a little slow, but the author makes sure that he's always improving something, he never stalls out. I actually find that I prefer a slower pace because it feels like the author fully explores each rank.

another thing I really like about this book is the way he writes his universe. He gives it a sense of vastness and a frog-in-the-bottom-of-a-well tone. the author also manages to add new information about his growth system without making it feel like a mistake. When we learn something new it feels like an organic addition rather than a hasty edit.

I'm sure there are things in need of improving, as with any book, but this series has been a breath of fresh air for me.

I highly recommend to anyone looking for an action packed read with a well done fusion of Xianxia growth systems and a videogame-esque System

Its start off good, but eventually I developed migraines over the fact that entire chapters are literally inner thought monologues regurgitating the same though 20 times. Like I get it, you need to do x to beat y, but plz for the love of god just do it and stop saying it 1000 times.